What my biggest mistake as a junior engineer taught me about taking ownership
As software developers, we get an “amazing” opportunity to fix what we’ve broken.
Someone order fried motherboards?!
A bit of background before we continue, at the beginning of my career in tech I worked as a Junior Software Engineer at a Samsung R&D Center Poland. I was being paid to build some pretty unique apps — my team was creating JavaScript applications for … SmartTVs.
Side note: building apps for TVs is wonderful because there’s only one resolution you need to care about so we could style entire apps withposition: absolute; because why not!SmartTVs have an entire motherboard in them (with surprisingly good hardware — we’re talking about multiple core processors and gigabytes of RAM! In a freaking TV!). At this point (back in 2013/2014) hardware was cheaper than software[citation needed].
In 2013, while at Samsung I was moved to a brand new exciting project:Tizen. I was moved since I had ‘vast’ experience with C++, apparently, two semesters at university was enough to qualify.
To quote Wikipedia: Tizen is a Linux-based mobile operating system backed by the Linux Foundation but developed and used primarily by Samsung Electronics.
At the time Tizen wasreallycutting edge (operating systems under heavy development tend to break all the time) but one day we got a present from HQ.
Three brand new shiny motherboards with the newest Tizen firmware.
In under an hour, two of them were fried to the point of no return.
Yes, I literally fried the ? out of them.
Why?
Well, I was told to perform a system update on those motherboards and to follow the instructions I was given.
Unfortunately, the instructions did not take into the account a quirk in the newest system version and performing those steps turned the rather expensive SmartTV motherboard into a useless piece of plastic.
After doing the system update on the first board I knew something funky happened.Did I make a mistake? I must of, crap, what do I do now?
Since I didn’t have a lot of experience I decided to simply repeat the steps one more time, this time making sure that I followed the instructions 100%. Turns out that Ididfollow them correctly both times.
I could have pretended I didn’t touch those boards, maybe they had arrived broken — honestly, everyone would have believed me.
After all, this was cutting edge stuff, things were supposed to break.
But in the end, I decided to tell my team lead:
Luckily he just chuckled and asked me why I’d gone and fried the second motherboard immediately after I broke the first one ?
